Pussy Riot supporters in Berlin, Germany. Many have questioned whether they can rely on the law to protect them from the powerful. Photograph: Sean Gallup/Getty

Compared with what's going on in other people's courts, Britain's domestic judicial problems, our ghoulish fascination with the 50-year-old Moors murders and even Julian Assange's extradition fight, are relatively small beer. Across the former Soviet bloc and into nominally communist China we are witnessing dramatic battles to separate justice from politics.

That fight is never over as disparate supporters of the WikiLeaks founder and countless other self-styled politicals have insisted down the years, sometimes rightly. Tony Blair felt persecuted by the Metropolitan police even in Downing Street, and this month Standard Chartered bank felt ill-used by what it sees as quasi-political regulatory threats in New York.

But the principle that judges should be independent – "as long as they behave themselves" – was entrenched in English statute law as long ago as 1702. "Be ye ever so mighty, the law is above you", as someone put it a few years later. That precept should protect Assange from the wrath of the White House, though it has mostly failed over Guantánamo Bay.

The rules are not so secure in China or Russia; shaky, too, in not-so-different cases which mingle politics and the courtroom in Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Ukraine – all former Soviet satellites and neighbours, three of them EU members, all struggling to establish proper boundaries or (it depends who's talking) to undermine them.

They command fewer headlines than Gu Kailai, confessed murderer of Neil Heywood in a Chinese hotel room, or Moscow's punk band trio, but are hugely important to their citizens, who question whether we can rely on the law to protect us from the powerful?

Is it a gloomy no-win situation? Of course not. Greater transparency is always painful and can mislead people into thinking things are getting worse, because crimes or scandals are being exposed when previously they were covered up.

So the glamorous Pussy Riot defenders are surely wrong historically when they say their trial for anti-Putin "hooliganism" in a cathedral is a Stalinist show trial. Under Stalin most such trials took place in secrecy, unbeknown to foreign correspondents working a few streets away, imperious to criticism or rebuttal.

Pussy Riot are on much stronger ground when they assert that – despite today's inevitable guilty verdict – they have beaten the politically manipulated judicial machine by the force of their arguments and their personalities.

"Now the whole world sees that the criminal case against us has been fabricated," they asserted in court. It has all happened in public – too hard to hide in the wired world of today – and a host of global rock royalty whom Vladimir Putin cannot harm is on their side. It might be prudent for Madonna and Macca to check their tea for polonium, all the same, because Russia seems to be slipping back into lawless ways which will do it no good.

Is China inching slowly in the opposite direction? Whatever has been going on in the closed-but-not-quite-secret Hefei intermediate people's court in China these past few weeks – the trial of disgraced politician Bo Xilai's wife for murder – it is all but impossible to establish at this time and distance what the real story is. In terms of the facts of the case and its wider meaning for the political direction of China there is only speculation. The official verdict is expected next week.

Was the Harrow-educated expat and middleman facilitator, Heywood, a greedy blackmailer, who threatened Gu's only son (he had earlier helped get him into Harrow) when a lucrative business deal went wrong, as the official narrative states. Or was he someone disposed of because he threatened to expose high-level corruption? Would the case have come to court at all – the British embassy did not over-exert itself after Heywood was found dead of a "heart attack" – had not Wang Lijun, the local police chief, taken Assange-style refuge in a US consulate, claiming his life was at risk as a whistleblower?

And is the decision to prosecute Gu in this high-profile way simply a byproduct of high politics and the urgent need to kill off the challenge to the Beijing leadership of Mr Gu, aka Bo Xilai, the ambitious mega-city boss in Chongqing and Mao-era revivalist, who had been using populist policies (curbing mafia gangs and promoting equality) to advance his claims for promotion to the politburo's standing committee?

Bo's name has not been mentioned in court, but it is corruption charges he faces, not promotion, if it suits the party to press home its advantage. A handful of Maoist supporters are reported to have been demonstrating outside the court (do they have public school leftists in China now?), which may tell us more about the authorities' wish to have their notoriously opaque legal system look " normal" to outsiders than anything else. British diplomats, but no reporters, have been allowed in.

So the Chinese trial is more akin to the running dramas in Ukraine – where jailed former prime minister, Yulia Tymoshenko, faces fresh charges of corruption and even complicity in murder – and in Romania's standoff between the conservative president, ex-oil-tanker captain, Traian Basescu, and the young (39) prime minister, Victor Ponta, a Blair-ish moderniser in a country where that label is not a stigma.

As in Hungary, where the reforming prime minister, Viktor Orbán, has frightened a lot of voters with his sweeping constitutional reforms (Paul Krugman calls it an "authoritarian slide" in the New York Times) since 2010, and neighbouring Bulgaria, where there is a crisis of authority in the court system, the EU has leverage here because all three are members, though not of the single currency zone.

Each case is different. Orbán's Fidesz party won a 68% mandate from voters in 2010 and used to make what were widely seen as extreme changes to the system, most notably by rigging the constitutional court, packing its membership, making it harder to bring cases and excluding a host of legislation from its remit. When we consider that reform of the eurozone will stand or fall on the ruling – is it legal? – of the German constitutional court the comparison is painful. Media control and rigged elections are also on the Hungarian menu.

In Bulgaria a judge was dismissed for unreasonable delays in court proceedings, though actually for criticising the supreme court and the interior minister, critics say. The EU is on the case here too. But all this takes place at a time when the credit-fuelled boom years are over (sounds familiar?) and the former eastern bloc states are under pressure – also from the EU – to retrench economically and get their budgets under control.

Times are hard and feelings run high. So in Romania, still under the shadow of the brutal and stupid Ceausescu regime, which ended in a hail of bullets in 1989, the standoff between Basescu and Ponta is also about a pro-austerity president whose party lost power after cuts in 2009 and a pro-growth social democrat who says the president should be politically neutral.

The EU has been pressing for reform on Romania's notoriously corrupt politics since long before the country was allowed to join Nato in 2004 and the EU in 2007. A referendum to depose Basescu was overwhelmingly carried by austerity-weary voters in July, but the supreme court has to rule on 31 August whether the necessary 50% of the electorate took part to validate it.

Basescu's supporters say he is a genuine reformer who has backed the national anti-corruption department, which is why so many of the political elite want him out. The former prime minister Adrian Nastase, Ponta's mentor, has been jailed for corruption. In London this week Ponta told the Guardian's Julian Borger the worst was over and the pair might yet "cohabit" if Basescu behaves.

Tricky, isn't it? In countries which for the most part lack settled traditions of respect for courts and constitutions, both sides stand accused of manipulating the system for political gain. It is a huge distraction from urgent economic tasks and threatens to deepen voter disillusion. Even in seemingly all-powerful Beijing, party bosses know ordinary Chinese are angry with elite corruption and the frailty of its justice.

But the outside world knows more about these proceedings than we would have done in past times. That's progress. Our legal battles nearer home show there is no room to be smug – but also that we are luckier than we sometimes remember to remember. The rule of law is the anchor for most of what we have.